Welcome everyone to Appear's Q2 2026 presentation. My name is Thomas Bostrøm Jørgensen, I'm the CEO at Appear, and today I also have with me our CFO, Per Øyvind Stene.

Let's get straight to the numbers. We kick off with the Q2 highlights, and as we've already announced in in July, our revenue came in at 189.6, which is down 30% year-on-year.

This is predominantly driven by shorter weaker short-term commercial execution in the regions outside the Americas, in in EMEA and and APAC, and also based on some market timing that we'll get into a bit later. I'm happy to say that our gross margin stayed at 70%, even in the face of, an adverse revenue quarter.

It does or it has had some experienced some headwinds based on weaker US dollar, and and we are, continuously impacted by the US tariffs, of course. The underlying EBITDA came in at 11.6, equals a 6.1% margin, obviously a direct result of lower product revenue for the quarter.

Our free cash flow came in at -54.3, which is down 15.8 million, negatively impacted by higher working capital, and that also includes corporate tax payments. Now, if we look at H1 as a whole, revenue came in at 421.3, which is close to where we were last year.

It's -2.8% year-on-year shortfall, predominantly coming from the same sort of sources: weaker commercial execution outside the Americas and and also negatively impacted by by currency. Gross margin at 70.1%, it's slightly down from from first half last year.

Again, negatively impacted primarily by forex and US tariffs. The underlying EBITDA came in at 37.5, equals an 8.9% margin, driven by lower gross profit and and, of course, increased operating costs.

Our free cash flow came in at -82.3. That's down 31.6 million NOK year-on-year.

This is really impacted negatively by working capital, including purchases of buffer inventory for long lead time components that we have secured. Now, we're going to move straight into updates, and I really want to start first off with the FIFA World Cup.

Appear, I think, delivered incredible customer value as part of this event. We we're really, proud to be part of an or part of the infrastructure that drove, all the 104 matches, over 4,500 camera feeds.

The content that we were part of creating and the experience and viewer experience that we were part of creating had just for for the final for Fox almost 40 million viewers, and, of course, over 5 billion global viewers. Even though, we had a we had a negative quarter, revenue-wise, we are still delivering a lot of customer value and and have taken a very, very significant and strong position in the in the sports live production market at the top of the pyramid.

That's a very strong position to keep. Now, if we go into the the shortfall, I want to spend a little time kind of explaining what happened in Q2.

The headlines here is market timing and coverage. As I'll I'll get to in a bit more detail, we clearly see a a timing air pocket currently happening in procurement basically, particularly relating to tier-1 events.

That has and is sort of negatively impacting not the value of the market, but but but procurement timing essentially. The good thing is that we'll we see that ramping strongly up through 2027 and and the following years after that, just based on on the calendar of large events and and rights deals.

The other part that's has impacted us is coverage, so basically our channel mix. We've, historically built up a very strong position with tier-1s, who are, concentrated mostly in in the Americas and and in the UK.

However, in order to properly penetrate the EMEA and APAC markets, we need to build out a much stronger indirect sales channel. That's something that we're working very hard on and and have been building out this year, and we believe will, strongly impact our our our growth and also slightly even out the the the peaks and the valleys in the years to come.

A bit more on how we think about the value of the market and and the timing of, investments in live production technology. As I think we've said before, the our market is strongly correlated with the rights value market.

As you can see on the right side, the the purple lines sort of shows the the rights spent from 2024 to 2021 no 2031 estimated. It's it's currently, this year at $67 billion.

The market is there because it's correlated with the rights value market. We're positioned very strongly with tier-1s, and so and so what's impacting our business currently is the timing, procurement timing in that market, because as you can see in the bar chart underneath, we've mapped out the procurement behavior relating to all global events and, of course, particularly impacted by tier-1 events, where we are super strong.

The procurement window, runs, 12 to 24 months ahead of the actual events. The way they're spread out over time, the big rights windows and the big events creates some big peaks and some deeper valleys in timing, in in in procurement timing.

That's obviously impacting us as a business because we have indexed very heavily on the global tier-1s that, love Appear as a vendor. Now, the other part of it the other part of this is route to market.

As I said initially, we have strongly proven out our direct sales model, particularly in the US and in the UK since 2021. We've built a very strong base of of, global broadcasters, leagues, rights holders.

We kind of have the numbers to witness it. We grew we've grown our average deal size with over 400%, our gross margin is up almost 7%, and we've grown our last 12-month revenue from 255 million in 2021 to to almost 800 million in June 2026.

The direct model works. However, we need also to expand into a channel model to reach markets that cannot naturally be served by direct selling.

That would typically be, large large part of the EMEA market and certainly the Asia-Pacific markets because of culture, language barriers, and so on. We have this year invested in building a very strong platform for for channel selling, and it's it's one of the biggest initiatives we have internally to drive growth into into EMEA and into APAC, using this this indirect sales channel model.

That kind of those are the two elements that I would say explain the shortfall that we've, seen this quarter. Fundamentally, right, how we look at expanding revenue is really across three elements.

I'm happy to say that we're we're going to come back to this in much more detail in the capital markets day that we're doing in relation to the Q3 results presentation on October 29th. Fundamentally, we're looking to expand our business in terms of route to market, right?

We are winning strong in in the tier-1 market today, and we are extending our reach with, channel partners to open the APAC market and larger parts of EMEA. Then in terms of, selling deeper.

You've heard me say before that we have a land and expand strategy, and this still stands. However, we are predominantly winning today with the same capabilities we had yesterday, per se.

We are investing heavily in widening our portfolio, going into adjacent markets where we're selling to the same customers based on like technology and knowledge that we already have in-house. This is, the this is attainable expansion along kind of the the portfolio vector.

Then finally, the software layer. Everyone that's following the market knows that there is a, growing market for purely software-based live production technology solutions.

We were it's something we've we have invest investing in strategically and and will be going forward. I'm happy to say that we had our first live we had our first customer using the VX platform live this summer during the Tour de France.

There'll be much more to come in that area in the years to come. Now, we're going to go into Q2 2026 in a bit more depth, but quickly looking at sort of on the revenue side of things, I mean if if you look if you take on the the longer glasses and look from Q1 '22 to Q2 2026, we've still delivered 30 32%, annual or or CAGR, annual growth over that period.

Obviously, as we said, we had a drop from Q2 last year to Q2 this year of 30%. As you can see from the graph of the bar chart against the strongest comp and the strongest quarter we've ever ever delivered by far in Q2 last year.

Looking a bit, deeper, I'm really happy to say that Q2 this year, witnessed a very strong build-up of support revenue. For us, that is recurring revenue.

Most of our support contracts are long, they are recurring, and they are compounding. This is, really, really high-quality, revenue for Appear.

Looking at the regions, you'll see that the Americas in Q2 itself dropped a bit, 7%, but on the on H1 isolated, Americas grew almost 20%. We still see a strong America market even in the face of, the procurement timing that we talked about earlier.

If we look at EMEA, we're clearly not happy with how it's developed. It's dropped 54% since Q2 last year.

As you can see again, it's it's against a very strong comp. We had a couple of large, one-offs in or large deals that landed in in Q2 last year.

We strongly believe that we'll be able to get EMEA back into growth by investing heavily in the in the channel sales motion and, of course, riding the the rights waves that, are coming and their procurement sort of windows opening again. Then in APAC, that in APAC, we're basically doing a full pivot or have done a full pivot from from all focusing mostly on direct selling to now focusing mostly on on channel selling.

The outcome of that, will take some time. Rebuilding a commercial engine does take some time, but we strongly believe that that's the right thing to do and that we'll see strong outcomes of that going forward as well.

With that, I'm going to hand it over to our CFO, Per Øyvind Stene.

Thank you. Let's begin with the Q2 P&L.

Thomas has taken us through the revenue variance. Revenues for Q2 ended at 190 million, 30% down year-on-year.

We had a negative currency contribution of about 10 million. Gross margin for the quarter was 70%, at par with the same period last year.

Product mix had a positive impact, but that impact was offset by negative currency effects. If we look at operating expenses, including capitalized development expenditures, the figure for Q2 2026 was 121 million versus 123 million in the same quarter last year, resulting in an EBITDA of 12 million at a 6.1% margin compared to 25.6 25.6% margin last year.

Profit for the period was 21 million versus 64 million in Q2 '25. Looking at the first half of '26, we began the year with a very strong Q1, then we had a weak Q2.

Revenues for the first half of the year was 421 million, down 2.8%. We had a slight positive volume effect, but that was more than offset by negative currency effects of 28 million NOK.

Gross margin for H1 was 70% 70.1%. That's 1.3 percentage points down from the same period last year, and the variance is explained by Q1 tariffs.

There were no tariffs in US in Q1 '25, and the weaker US dollar. With the reversal of bonus accruals in Q1 sorry, Q2, looking at the operating expenses for the full first half year is probably going to give a better and clearer perspective of our cost base.

Total operating expenses, including again capitalized development expenditures, was 258 million in H1 '26 compared to 220 million in H1 '25. Bearing in mind that the '26 figures have no company bonuses, that variance was mainly explained by us increasing our number of employees, going from an average FTE count of 195 to 235 for the first half of '26.

The EBITDA for H1 '26 was 37.5 million at an 8.9% margin compared to 94.2 million and 21.7% margin last year. Operating profits were down to 59 million from 112 million, and profit for the period was 46 million compared to 85 million.

Going to cash flow: free cash flow for Q2 was negative -54 million. For H1, the figure was -82 million.

That's the same as the net cash flow, as the figure highlights. Cash outflows are a bit tilted towards the first half of the year with corporate tax payments and also company bonuses for '25 being paid in the first half of the year.

We funded increased inventory investment and investments in development of new technology with a drawdown of 100 million from our money market funds, resulting in a cash balance of 78 million at the end of June. Concluding the financial review with available liquidity: we had 426 million in available funds at the end of June.

That's 73 million down from the beginning of the year. Our working capital is up, as we mentioned a few times, mainly due to higher inventory levels, and our metric of working capital over revenues that we want to keep below 10% also increased due to lower revenues.

Thank you, Per Øivind. On the financial targets, this is, of course, the same we have communicated before.

Our guidance for the year continues to be 880 to 920 after the update in July, which equals a revenue growth in the interval between 10% to 15%. Our long to medium-term trajectory stays the same, revenue growth in the interval between 25% and 30%, recurring revenue in the interval between 15% and 25%, gross margin at or about 70%, and the EBITDA margin in the interval between 17% to 20%.

Now, finally, we're happy to invite for our first capital markets day in collaboration with ABG to be held in their offices on October 29th between 10:00 and 2:00, basically right after this webcast for the Q3 results. We have done quite a lot of work that we're excited to share, both on market data, what kind of the next layer of what the market looks like in terms of segmentation, in terms of adjacent opportunities for Appear and where we're looking to invest.

We've, as you've seen, also mapped out sort of a procurement intensity model, which essentially takes all the global events, maps the purchasing window for those out in time, and kind of develops a sort of procurement intensity curve that I was taking you through earlier. Of course, we'll go more into how we're looking to expand our revenue, our revenue engine, more customer insights from key accounts, and fundamental kind of baselining of our strategy and our plan for execution going forward.

Please sign up using the link on the page. With that, I think we'll move to the Q&A.

Thank you. I wanted to start with EMEA.

EMEA was down, yeah, around 50% year-over-year. Can you give some more color on this?

I know you had a good quarter in EMEA in Q2 last year. Is this simply due to tough comps?

Can you give some more flavor on why this was so weak this quarter?

Yes, I think for EMEA, we have predominantly gone direct. As I said, that puts us very much that puts our EMEA business more as a function of the procurement, windows of of driven by the large players and the large rights.

We have learned and are now executing on the fact that the market is much more channel-driven than we originally anticipated. I think that those are the kind of fundamental components.

In order to get to the available deal flow, we have to develop a much stronger channel in in the market.

One of your kind of key success factors the last few years has been the fact that you have invested heavily in your direct sales method. Are you afraid that this is a risk to go more through the channel, that this direct sales method has proven very valuable to you?

Is that could not be as good as the direct method?

No, I think different markets require different channels, essentially. The big global customers have very high concentration in the US market and in the UK market and some parts of EMEA.

That has worked really well, but it also makes us susceptible to timing, essentially, driven by large rights and large events. Under the large events, there's a big market that have to be served indirect because they don't really have the operational and/or technical capability to engage directly with vendors.

They're relying on service providers, system integrators, or resellers to actually either build their infrastructure or operate it.

Makes sense. Longer term, this requires, of course, less direct sales people.

Can this be kind of positive for margins if you can drive more sales through the channel in these areas?

Clearly doesn't need less direct sales people because we are expanding our business in the US, we still have direct sales runway to go even with our existing product portfolio in the US market. This is an extension to the direct sales approach, and, of course, that extension doesn't require that many new sales people because selling is then done by the partners, but it does require a stronger, let's say, operational partner engine essentially.

That's what we've been building this year.

Lastly, one last question on opex for the remainder of the year. Is there anything you can do to kind of reduce opex now in the second half of the year, or kind of should we expect that if we add back that reversal of the incentive programs that you have, that level is the same, essentially the same level should be in the second half of the year?

We are looking at getting our cost base in line more with our revenues and these ranges of profitability that we want to be within. We are looking at reducing our costs to get in line there, but yeah, I don't want to go into specifics on that more than that there is a bit of a rebasing of the cost base to be more in line with where we are on our revenue growth trajectory.

I think it's fair to say we're not looking necessarily to reduce costs, we're looking not to increase costs, but it's two very different things.

Yeah. Sure.

Yeah. Those were all my questions.

Thank you very much.

All right. Thank you very much for tuning in.

Really hope that as many of you as possible will join our next session, the Q3 and the capital markets day. Thank you.